


Accidental Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wounds

by Tyleet



Series: nothing but the bones [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief, Masturbation, Minor Character Death, PTSD, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-21
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-14 17:28:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Tyleet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's nine o'clock at night when Laura gets back to her dorm room, and two cops are waiting at her door.</p><p>They ask her if it's okay to come inside. They have bad news.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Accidental Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wounds

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, god. This is an angst fest, from beginning to end. Trigger warnings for everything (at least it feels like everything.) Implied underage Derek/Kate, sex-related ptsd, for grief, for victim blaming, for serious violence. There's a lot of messed up stuff in Derek's past, and I tried to draw all of it out in this fic. Or at least a lot of it. Unbeta'd, so all mistakes are mine. I have no idea how hospitals/insurance/comas work in real life, so if I've got any of that wrong, I apologize. 
> 
> The title is from A Softer World. It's set in the same world as "Smile (everything will be fine)", so I decided to put them in a series, but really they both stand alone.

  
It's nine o'clock at night when Laura gets back to her dorm room, and two cops are waiting at her door.  
  
Something's wrong, she thinks, fingers tightening on her book bag. She thinks, strangely, that maybe someone's figured her out and called the police, that maybe they're hunters in uniform, and she freezes at the top of the stairs.  
  
"Laura Hale?" one calls out to her. She doesn't sound like a hunter. She sounds sympathetic. Laura's heart starts pounding so hard that she's distantly amazed they can't hear it.  
  
"Yes," she manages.  
  
They ask her if it's okay to come inside. They have bad news.  
  
*  
  
She doesn't remember much about the two hour drive, but later she will be amazed that she didn't kill herself on the freeway. She remembers feeling very, very cold, and whenever she let herself think about anything besides get home, home, you need to get home, she wouldn't be able to breathe, and the shakes would come back.  
  
The next thing she remembers with any clarity is getting to the hospital. There's a deputy waiting for her in the ER, and she can't hear a thing he's saying because she can smell Emily and Derek, Mom, Uncle Peter, and she doesn't let herself think about Dad or Jeremy or all the other heartbeats still missing because her pack is close and she _needs to be with them_.  
  
She pushes past the deputy without speaking to him, ignores the shouting, ignores the hands that reach out to restrain her, ignores everyone who gets in her way and follows the sound of her little sister's heartbeat past two sets of double doors into a room with two beds and too many people in white coats swarming between them.  
  
There's more shouting, more hands. Laura doesn't move, not caring that she's pretending to be a frail eighteen-year old human, because her senses are telling her that's her little sister lying on the bed but it can't be true.  
  
*  
  
She doesn't let herself remember what she sees in that room.  
  
Emily is six. Emily has freckles. Emily has hazel eyes and wispy hair and loves Peter Pan, and that's how Laura has to remember her.  
  
She's not strong enough for the rest. She's not.  
  
*  
  
Laura is sitting in a hospital waiting room with a woman's arms around her shoulders, the woman speaking in a calm, soothing voice. She's saying "You don't have to be strong enough, honey. Nobody's strong enough for something like this." It doesn't sound like the first time she's said it, and that's when Laura realizes she's speaking, too, words pulsing through her like blood. _I'm not strong enough, not strong enough, not strong enough_.  
  
"Nobody's strong enough," the woman says patiently. She's wearing cheap lavender clothes. Scrubs. She's a nurse, and she's been sitting with Laura even though she undoubtedly has other things to do.  
  
Laura shakes her head, but stops talking, struggling to get her breathing under control.  
  
After a while the nurse asks her if she wants to see her brother.  
  
Laura shakes her head violently, terrified at the thought of seeing Derek hooked up to machines and barely breathing, but the nurse seems to understand immediately and starts apologizing.  
  
"No, no, I'm so sorry, your brother's fine," she says, one hand still warm on Laura's back. "He's absolutely fine. He's with a deputy. I thought you'd want a chance to calm down first."  
  
*  
  
Derek doesn't want her to touch him, and he won't talk, and he's white and trembling but all in one piece. She could cry, she's so grateful.  
  
*  
They sit up in the hospital waiting room for a long time.  
  
Derek still won't let her get too close, but he lets her grab onto his wrist, her fingers probably bruising him, even though he's sitting as far away from her as he can be while still sitting next to her.  
  
The rest of it passes by in a blur of paperwork and questions and people in various uniforms, all of it hard to hang on to except for her brother, like Derek is the only solid thing, her grip on his wrist the only thing keeping her human.  
  
The doctors come out after a while and tell them that Emily is dead. That it was a miracle she held on this long, honestly. They give Laura more paperwork, and she has to fill it out one-handed because she won't let go of Derek.  
  
The sheriff sits down next to Derek and asks them both in a gentle voice if they know of anybody who might want to hurt their family, and of course they can't answer. After a while, he leaves.  
  
Laura can't remember her mom's social security number. She probably never knew it in the first place. Her mom's social security card would be in her desk. She leaves far too many boxes blank.  
  
The nurse who told her Derek was alive stops by and asks them if they've eaten anything. Derek doesn't answer, and Laura blinks and asks what? The nurse sighs and comes back ten minutes later with pop tarts and apple juice from a vending machine.  
  
Derek won't eat. He won't even look at the food until she lets herself shift, just a little, just her eyes, just to pull rank for a second. It's a low blow, especially now, but if she has to force him to take care of himself then she _will_. As soon as she does, Derek jerks back like she's hit him, eyes wide, and she is about to ask him why when it hits her--power hot and fierce and raging in her belly like a fire, so strong that she's almost dizzy with it.  
  
 _I'm the alpha_ , she realizes distantly, and her eyes must be flashing red because she wants to kill something--really, viscerally, she wants to feel flesh ripping under her claws, blood hot and vicious and good in her mouth.  
  
"Laura," Derek says in a small, cracked voice, the first thing he's actually said to her, and she breathes in and hangs onto her shape.  
  
The doctors come out to tell them a little while later that their mom is dead, which is pointless, because Laura is the alpha so of course she is.  
  
"Drink the juice," she tells Derek eventually, voice hoarse.  
  
He does.  
  
*  
  
The doctors tell them that Uncle Peter is in surgery, but they're not holding out much hope.  
  
They sleep in the waiting room.  
  
When they wake up nothing has changed.  
  
*  
  
They're told they need to go home. Laura and Derek stare at the doctor blankly.  
  
They're told they should check into a hotel.  
  
They leave the hospital and park Laura's car outside a hotel, and then they go home, running all the way. Their house is still standing, but only barely. There's yellow crime scene tape around the ruins.  
  
Laura changes for the first time, and it hurts, her body strange and unfamiliar and strong, but what's worse is the rage flooding into her, this hard hot need to feel something bleeding out into her mouth, rage because as a wolf all she can smell is ash and family, smoke and bone.  
  
Then Derek changes, and suddenly he's the most important thing in the entire world, Derek-pack-baby-brother-beta-her beta, and the rage is fueled by this rush of protectiveness, and she rushes at him, snarling and strong, and nothing feels at all right until he bares his throat and whines.  
  
 _Mine_ , she tells him, and he agrees, and she lets the new protective feeling rise up in her chest, and she and her beta run from the house in the woods on bloody bare feet.  
  
*  
  
They go back to the hospital. They're told Uncle Peter is still in the ICU, and they can't see him yet. The "yet" almost gives Laura hope, but then the doctor starts asking her about how long they want to extend his life. "As long as possible," she says, because the longer they can give his body to heal, the likelier it is that she can get one tiny piece of her family back.  
  
They're told they need to talk to the funeral home.  
  
Laura checks the boxes for cremation. Derek doesn't argue, even though she expects him to--this isn't how they do things. But the funeral home won't give them the bodies to bury, and she doesn't want to see anything but ash if she doesn't have to. Let ashes be ashes, she thinks distantly.  
  
The sheriff tells them they have conclusive evidence that the fire was arson. Are they sure they can't think of anyone who might have wanted to do this?  
  
"No," Laura tells him, "nobody."  
  
Derek doesn't speak at all.  
  
*  
  
Uncle Peter doesn't die.  
  
Laura starts making plans for how to break him out if his healing starts to kick in. All the plans she can think of are reckless and hopeless and will most likely end with all three of them getting arrested, or killed by hunters.  
  
Uncle Peter doesn't wake up.  
  
She's torn between relief and sorrow, and finally settles on anger. It feels good, hot and raging in her core, like fire.  
  
*  
  
"Who did it," Laura asks Derek in the woods. They've just killed a deer, because Laura needed to kill something, and when Derek shifts back he's shirtless and covered in blood. Laura can _smell_ that none of it is his but a part of her wants to check him for injuries just in case.  
  
"I don't know," Derek says, and she knows by his heartbeat that he's lying.  
  
" _You know_ ," she snarls, and her voice is inhuman even though she's shifted back, too, and she pulls out every gun in her arsenal without thinking about reaching for them, her eyes burning hot and red, her hands suddenly claws in the dirt, fangs lengthening in her mouth. "Tell me," she says, because if Derek knows that means she can kill them, kill them like they killed the deer, put all this new alpha strength to good use and snap their spines and get their blood under her fingernails and make them hurt for hurting her, kill them dead enough that no one will touch Laura or her pack ever again, kill them and fix what went wrong.  
  
"I don't know," Derek repeats on a whisper, and god help them but her brother has never been able to lie to anyone.  
  
"I'll kill them, Derek," she tells him mindlessly, almost soothing, "just tell me and I'll kill them, I promise I'll kill them for you."  
  
"Hunters," he says, and his voice cracks again, and suddenly she's reminded that he's sixteen, that he just turned sixteen a month ago, that she shouldn't be making him deal with this, that nobody should have to deal with this. "Hunters. It has to be hunters. I don't--I don't know," he tells her, and she lets the change slide off her until she's just his sister.  
  
It occurs to her again that someone murdered her family, that they did it on purpose, and that they must know she and Derek are still alive.  
  
 _You need to do better than this_ , she tells herself. _This is your job, now. You need to do better_.  
  
*  
  
They do not hold a funeral. Laura empties practically her entire bank account into the funeral home until they agree to bury all fourteen urns in a vault at Greendale cemetery, without Derek and Laura's presence.  
  
She visits Uncle Peter. Derek won't. She sits next to the bed, and holds his bandaged hand, and tells him that she's sorry, but she needs to take care of Derek, now. She breathes carefully through her mouth.  
  
"We'll come back," she tells him. "If you wake up, we'll be back for you in a second." She whispers her new phone number in his ear, and her new email, just in case.  
  
She spends three hours at the bank and six hours on the phone to the insurance company. She gets access to her mom's accounts, and she tells herself it should make her feel better, because this means they can leave.  
  
She tells the sheriff's department that they'll be happy to answer any further questions, but she and her brother are leaving town. She privately thanks god that her dad had paperwork drawn up years ago stating that if anything happened to any of them, custody of any children would fall to any of the remaining Hale adults. That was after the challenge from the Sacramento pack, when they'd been afraid of dissolution, of losing their alpha, of CPS descending and taking new, barely-controlled werewolves and leaving them with humans. At the time it had been the worst thing Laura could imagine.  
  
They spend far too much time sitting in the sheriff's department, filling out forms and dodging sympathetic questions before they're finally allowed to leave.  
  
She pushes Derek into the passenger seat of her car, and refuses to think about why Derek hasn't once expressed an opinion on what he thinks they should do, just moved where she told him and signed anything she put in front of him.  
  
Derek stares out the window the entire drive, and doesn't speak.  
  
It takes about two hours to pack two suitcases and a carryon from the stuff in her room. She leaves her roommate a note saying she can have whatever she wants from the remainder, and throw the rest out.  
  
She gets back in the car, and drives them to the airport.  
  
Derek doesn't ask her where they're going until they're actually on the plane.  
  
"Somewhere we won't be easy to find," she tells him.  
  
He shrugs, and looks out the window.  
  
*  
  
For the first couple months, all they do is hide in their apartment, living off their mom's money. They eat a lot of takeout, watch a lot of mind-numbing tv. Laura finds it hard to let Derek out of her sight for more than fifteen minutes at a time at first, but that's fine because almost the only time Derek leaves the house is to get books from the library. He sits in his room with the door firmly shut and reads, and Laura sits on the couch and listens to his heartbeat.  
  
Derek does his level best to avoid being touched. Laura does her level best to avoid getting angry. Whenever she fails, and finds herself screaming at her baby brother like any of this is his fault, she goes out, and Manhattan welcomes her, anonymous and violent and beautiful. She walks alone in Central Park at night with her eyes shining red and and her lips painted redder and thinks _I dare you_.  
  
*  
She almost kills an Omega, about a month after they get there.  
  
She's been taught to despise Omegas--not part of a _pack_ , either kicked out because they did wrong, because they killed humans, because they challenged and lost, or because their pack was gone, and they were the last loose end in a hunter's notebook. Marked for death, either way.  
  
The Omega is in his thirties. He has dark brown eyes, and a great smile, and Laura can smell his desperation from a mile away. He's tending bar at the tiny hole in the wall she walks into, and they both freeze as soon as they scent each other.  
  
Laura lets herself smile, just a little, feeling the ugly heat rise up in her chest, and the Omega bolts, dropping the glass he was cleaning and running through the kitchen for the back door.  
  
He makes it to the alleyway, but Laura is there, and with two quick strikes and a wild grin with a mouth full of fangs, the Omega falls back against the alley wall, throat bared.  
  
"Alpha," he says, almost moaning with fear.  
  
Laura lets herself grow claws, and traces one underneath the Omega's chin, tilting it up. "Were you banished, or did they die?" she asks, and she can barely recognize her own voice, it's so thick with fury.  
  
"Hunters," the Omega sobs. "Hunters, _please_. They didn't know about me, I was away, they didn't know. I'll submit," he says suddenly, his hands reaching out, wrist-side up, and he almost touches her before she flinches back. "I'll be yours," he promises, squeezing his eyes shut. "Anything."  
  
For a second she considers it. Considers pushing up his shirt and sinking her claim into his skin, until he feels like hers. Soothing the desperation from his face. Taking him back to the apartment, pushing him down into her bed until he smells like pack, like something new to love and protect, something to fill up the gaping hole in her life. She imagines telling Derek that she's building a new pack, that they need to keep living. She imagines coming home to the apartment on fire, the hunters that killed the Omega's pack waiting for her with cruel smiles. Derek's scent and no heartbeat.  
  
Without consciously willing it, her hand is tight on the Omega's neck, claws digging into his skin, his pulse hammering wildly under her fingers.  
  
"Get out," she snarls, and draws back her hand. "I don't mean out of the city. Get out of the state. You never saw me."  
  
As soon as she finishes speaking, he's gone.  
  
*  
  
Six months after arriving in New York, Laura tells Derek he's going back to school.  
  
"No," he says, glaring. He's been holed up in his room for almost a week, with only a stack of books for company.  
  
"You're already enrolled," she says briskly. "You start Monday. Might want to shower first."  
  
"I'm not. Going," he says, sarcastic in the way only sixteen year olds are.  
  
"It's cute that you think that," she says flatly. She eyes his shirt, gray with age and old sweat. "You need to go back to school shopping, or something?"  
  
"Laura," he growls, suddenly on his feet and towering over her, "I am not going back."  
  
"Watch it," she says dangerously, letting her eyes flash.  
  
Derek backs up immediately, although he still looks mutinous.  
  
She waits for a moment, letting the tension build, and then sighs. "We'll talk about it tomorrow, okay?"  
  
Derek slams his door shut behind her.  
  
*  
  
He doesn't like school. He takes a great deal of relish in telling her exactly how much he hates it. She's honestly glad to see him get this worked up over something.  
  
He doesn't really seem to make friends. A girl comes over to study, once, and afterward Laura gently teases him about having a girlfriend.  
  
He flinches back like she hit him.  
  
"Derek--" she starts out, worried, but he's already reaching for his jacket, headed out the door.  
  
"Hey!" she says, following him into the hallway even as he storms out. "Are you gonna tell me what's going on with you? You have to talk to me when something's wrong, or--"  
  
" _She's not my girlfriend_ ," her brother snarls. "And you're not Mom." He winces even as he says it, but he doesn't take it back.  
  
She lets him go, because if she doesn't, she's afraid she'll hurt him.  
  
*  
  
Her mom was a great alpha. Her mom had this steel in her voice, so even if she was speaking quietly, you _heard_ her. Her mom never lost her temper. She was warm and strong and Laura could never measure up, not in a million years, but--  
  
\--What kind of alpha is constantly on the edge of hurting her own brother, just to have someone to hurt? What kind of alpha can barely hang onto her anchor, even outside of the full moon?  
  
Her anchor was always her family, but now that's just a messed up sixteen year old, and he's not _enough_.  
  
What kind of sister thinks that about her brother?  
  
*  
  
She hears Derek jerking off in his room, about eight months in.  
  
It's close to four in the morning, and the sound of his uneven breathing wakes her up. She panics for a second, thinking that he's hurt, or having nightmares, but then the slick repetitive sound catches up to her, and she gets it.  
  
She gets up as silently as she can to leave--when you've got super-hearing, privacy becomes more of a distance issue than anything else--but realizes with a weird jolt that Derek isn't just spending some quality time with his hand. He's crying.  
  
Her baby brother's in the other room trying to sob as quietly as he can, and she hasn't seen him cry once since the fire, and she's his _alpha._ Everything in her needs to hug him tight like she did when he was little, tell him he'll be okay. But she can't, even though it sounds like his heart is breaking, because he's also about to come, so she sits motionless on her bed and cries silently with him.  
  
*  
  
It won't occur to her until much later that she never caught him masturbating before, not in eight months of claustrophobia. Never so much as smelled arousal on him, or in the apartment after she'd been gone. Much later, she will learn about a pretty blond woman with a hunter's necklace that people remember seeing hanging around her brother, before the fire. The implication will make her actually throw up.  
  
*  
  
After Derek's been in school for a while, Laura thinks about getting a job, just to have something to do.    
  
She lasts two weeks as a waitress before she breaks three plates and a customer's hand when it winds up on her ass.  
  
She tells Derek after school, rolling her eyes and secretly hoping he'll smile.  
  
"You should have broken more than his hand," Derek says without a trace of humor. "I'm serious. I," his lips thin, "I would have."  
  
"Next time," she replies, unsettled.  
  
She gets a job as a barista. She lasts three hours before accidentally breaking the espresso machine, deals with another twenty minutes of her boss yelling about italian-made copper tubing and thousands of dollars coming out of all her future paychecks, and then she grabs a latte out of a customer's hand and throws it in his face.  
  
Derek smiles, faintly, and tells her to get over herself and go back to school.  
  
She tells him that's sweet, but not happening.  
  
"You made me go back to school," he says, annoyed.  
  
"Because I wasn't going to let you be a dropout," she says automatically.  
  
He raises his eyebrows.  
  
She doesn't tell him that she needs to feel like an adult right now, and starting her freshman year over won't help with that, or that even though there's a lot of money when you pool nine people's resources with the insurance checks, college costs a _lot_ , because he smiled at her tonight, and she doesn't want to ruin it.  
  
"I'll think about it," she tells him.  
  
*  
  
They don't go back to Beacon Hills on the anniversary of the fire, but Laura calls the long-term care facility in the morning and talks to Peter's nurse. There's no change.  
  
It's also the day that the insurance money finally comes through.  
  
After fielding that phone call, Laura celebrates by finding the cheapest dive bar she can and drinking as much as they'll sell her, before moving on to the second cheapest. Eventually the world starts getting fuzzier, and her head stops hurting so much, and she finds the prettiest boy in the bar and fucks him in the bathroom.  
  
He asks her for her number, after, and she tells him _no, sweetheart, it's not like that, my family's dead_.  
  
It isn't until she gets home around three in the morning, unsteady and trying to be quiet as she unlocks the door, that she realizes she left Derek alone all day.  
  
*  
  
She was never really interested in cooking, and after the fire she was even less interested in learning how, so she and Derek eat out of a lot of delivery boxes.  
  
But one morning she decides she wants an omelet, and in a fit of determination she walks down to the store and picks up eggs, cheese, and avocado.  
  
She pulls out the frying pan she bought when they first moved in, and has been used maybe once or twice since, drops a slice of butter in the middle, and turns the flame on high.  
  
She whisks the eggs and hums a little bit, and then pours them into the pan with an angry sizzle.  
  
It's not until after she's sliced the cheese and getting ready to drop it into the pan that she really starts to pay attention to the way the eggs are cooking. There's a crack, and the yellow circle blisters, bubbles, hissing against the hot pan. The longer she leaves it, the more noises it makes--there's a high pitched squeaking noise, and the pneumonic hum of the fire. Flesh protests at being burned, she thinks. Even without mouths, or vocal chords. The bodies themselves.  
  
She throws the eggs out.  
  
When Derek asks her why she's only eating a salad for dinner, she tells him she's been feeling sick.  
  
*  
  
She signs up at Hunter College because Derek won't let it go, and she can't come up with a good reason not to.  
  
She picks classes that all vaguely resemble the ones she had at Stanford, since she never got to finish, and doesn't let herself think too deeply about why she's breaking out into a sweat walking through the halls, or why unease is prickling up and down her spine.  
  
Ten minutes into her medieval literature class, and it hits her: this is what she was doing. She was at the library doing research for a paper. She only went to college because of everything they gave her, even though it meant leaving pack territory for four years, even though it meant she was alone and couldn't help, even though it meant that she was reading Shakespeare while they were _burning_ , and she didn't even _know_ \--  
  
She bursts up out of her chair and calls Derek as soon as she's in the hall.  
  
He picks up on the twelfth ring, voice echoing like he's in a bathroom. "What's wrong?"  
  
"Hey," she says, breathless with relief, "hey."  
  
"Are you okay?" he asks immediately, worry sharp in his voice.    
  
"I'm fine," she assures him, sliding down the wall to sit on the floor. "I'm okay." She breathes in deeply, and lets her breath out slow.  
  
"…Did you need something?" He sounds more suspicious than concerned now, which is good.  
  
"No," she says, closing her eyes. "No, sorry. I was freaking out over nothing."  
  
"Do you need me to come get you?" he asks seriously. Never mind that she's the one with the car, or that he's the minor who's skipping chemistry right now, or that she's his alpha. Shame licks at her throat, making her voice hoarse.  
  
"Definitely not," she says. "Look, I'll see you tonight, okay?"  
  
She hangs up, and heads straight for the registrar's office.  
  
 _I'm strong enough for this,_ she tells herself. She changes all her classes from English to Criminal Justice. _I am_.  
  
*  
  
Derek gets better. She tells herself he's getting better.  
  
He does pretty good in school, even if he doesn't really make friends. He thinks her major is ridiculous, and gets a kick out of calling her Veronica Mars. He goes outside more often.  
  
He falls asleep on the couch, and his head gently droops onto her shoulder. He doesn't wake up when she eases an arm around him, relaxing into the touch.  
  
*  
  
Laura doesn't get better. At least she doesn't feel better. There's still this white-hot rage in the pit of her stomach, and with everything she's learning about forensics and the justice system and how murders work comes this unshakable need to _know_.  
  
Hunters, Derek had said. That's what they'd both thought. But why? They'd never broken their Code. Unless someone had? What kind of hunter kills humans? Human children? It doesn't add up.  
  
She's pretty sure she isn't better.  
  
*  
  
She gets a call from Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital. Peter's come out of his coma.  
  
Sort of, Laura corrects herself, and almost crushes the phone in her hand.  
  
"He's in a catatonic state," a doctor says calmly on the other end, and nothing brings the fury back like those cold clinical voices. "That means that while he is conscious, and capable of guided movement, he is unresponsive and incapable of speech. Do you understand, Miss Hale?"  
  
"We'll be there as soon as we can," she says, and hangs up the phone before she adds something stupid, like: _tell him we're coming_.  
  
She picks Derek up from school and fills him in on the way to the airport.  
  
"So he could be awake," Derek says immediately, focusing in on her intently. "He might just not trust the human doctors, or--"  
  
"Or maybe he's not awake yet," Laura says grimly. "But he could wake up at any time." And if it's his healing starting back up--if it's taken almost two years to ease him out of a coma, then rousing him from catatonia shouldn't take long at all, not when he knows Laura and Derek are close.  
  
"You should sleep," she orders Derek when the plane starts its ascent. He already looks tired and freaked out, and they've still got eight hours before they land in Sacramento, and then a two-hour drive to Beacon Hills.  
  
Derek glares at her. "Are you gonna sleep?"  
  
"Yes," she lies. She reaches over him and slides his window shut. "I'm serious, Derek. Sleep."  
  
He shuts his eyes pointedly, and then turns away from her, so all she can see is his shoulder.  
  
They both stay awake with their eyes shut until the plane starts its descent, and then she's pretty sure Derek starts drifting just to piss her off.  
  
She hates the way he wakes up: not slow, not sweet, just freezing, clearly assessing what he can hear and what he can feel before he lets anyone know he's awake.  
  
"Come on," she says. "Time to go."  
  
Derek doesn't talk at all on the drive up. She would worry more about him starting to shut down if she didn't feel like silence was their best bet, too.  
  
They make it to the hospital just before visiting hours end.  
  
Peter has a private room--Laura made sure he had that much, as soon as she could--and he's sitting in a wheelchair facing the window when they get there.  
  
"Uncle Peter?" she says, taking a step into the room.  
  
He doesn't move.  
  
She walks closer to him. He doesn't look bad--not nearly as bad as she remembers, when he was almost entirely covered in white bandages. He's wearing a grey bathrobe and she can just see his face in profile. "Uncle Peter, it's Laura. Derek's here, too." She puts a hand carefully on his shoulder. He doesn't twitch, so she pulls him around so she and Derek can see him dead on.  
  
She flinches back immediately, and through the rushing in her ears she can hear Derek drawing in a harsh breath, too.  
  
Peter's face is a ruin. It's like he's Two-Face--half of him is smooth and unblemished, the uncle she remembers, and the other half is wrecked, red and angry and blistered, exactly like he'd been burnt in a fire, exactly like--  
  
 _like the thing Laura has been trying to forget about for two years, the tiny charred thing on the bed in the hospital, next to the moaning wreck that used to be her mom, the thing that twitched when she said "Emily," aloud involuntarily, then rattled, as if it were trying to answer--_  
  
and she's shaken back by the sound of someone running, and she realizes that Peter's still sitting there, vacant and motionless, and that Derek is gone, that Derek couldn't deal.  
  
"I'm sorry," she tells Peter hoarsely, and then she goes after her brother.  
  
*  
  
She finds Derek at the house.  
  
It looks a lot like the last time she saw it, except that the smoke and the yellow tape are gone.  
  
Derek's in what used to be their living room, sitting on the blackened floor with his knees drawn up to his chest, leaning against the couch. She's distantly surprised the couch survived. She sits down on it anyway.  
  
"I'm sorry," she says finally. "I should have made that easier for you."  
  
He barks out a laugh, but doesn't look up at her.  
  
"Yeah," she sighs. Like anything about this was ever going to be easy. "But. I'm your alpha. It's my job to take care of you, and that--" she takes in a deep breath. "That was me messing up."  
  
Derek looks up at that, mouth twisted. "It's not your fault," he says angrily.  
  
But it is. There's a thin emotional connection between betas and their alpha, and a strong alpha only uses it to calm their beta down, or offer comfort. Laura brought Derek into a traumatic situation, and instead of looking after him, she started projecting horror.  
  
"No. I'm not--doing this right," she says roughly.  
  
"You're fine," Derek snaps. "You--you have nothing to do with what went wrong, okay?"  
  
"No," she agrees, because she _wasn't here_ , and she's never going to forget that she wasn't here, not until the day she dies. "But this could be better now, and I'm sorry that it's not."  
  
"It's not your fault," Derek repeats, eyes wide and desperate, scrubbing a hand over his mouth.  
  
"We can go home tomorrow," she tells him helplessly. "We don't have to stay, if you don't want."  
  
There's a long silence where she pretends that the word _home_ isn't floating in the air between them. "That--won't help," Derek says finally.  
  
He hides his head in his arms and doesn't move, so Laura curls up on the couch, which smells like smoke, and doesn't move either. She doesn't tell Derek that she's afraid he'd be better off without her. That maybe she'd be better off without him, because then she could give in to the rage that has never stopped burning, to her impossible need to know, and she wouldn't have to worry that she was hurting him.  
  
Much, much later, she will give in, and she will be rewarded. She will come back to Beacon Hills, entirely alone, and she will learn and learn until she knows exactly who she has to kill. She will feel hungry and righteous, revenge hot and ripe on her tongue. Peter will wake up, and for a brief moment it will feel like she has everything she asked for.  
  
For now, she breathes in when her brother breathes in, and breathes out when her brother breathes out. She closes her eyes, and lets herself sink into the familiar couch. She ignores the smell of smoke. She tells herself they can keep on going. 

**Author's Note:**

> And that's all she wrote. :) Comments and concrit make me happy.


End file.
